Arkansas traveler shares experience with flight cancellation after tech outage amid Department of Transportation investigation into Delta Airlines

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – Since Friday’s global tech outage, the Department of Transportation said Delta Airlines has canceled and delayed flights, impacting thousands of their customers.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday that the DOT is investigating Delta’s flight cancellations and their recovery time following the global tech outage last week.

“I’m very concerned about including people being on hold for hours and hours trying to get a new flight, people having to sleep on airport floors, even accounts of unaccompanied minors being stranded in airports unable to get on a flight,” Buttigieg said.

Blake Lofgren knows the feeling of waking up to see his flight was canceled.

“Waking up at 4 a.m. to make a flight decision and to rebook a flight that same morning was kind of crazy,” Lofgren said.

“Turned a four-hour travel day into a 12-hour travel day with three stops and $800 later,” Lofgren said.

Thankfully, Lofgren said he had researched and found a flight that would still get him to his destination.

“You know it’s just not fun, it’s really just a stressful way to start a day,” Lofgren said. “We made it just not ideal for what you would consider normal summer travel.”

He shares that, luckily, this was just a personal trip, but he acknowledges that this situation could have been detrimental for some had it been for business or an emergency.

Issues first arose Friday when a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike sent out a faulty software update that caused computers running Windows worldwide to crash.

“In a way, aviation is technology, the technology has evolved, and software is playing more of a role,” Buttigieg said. “We’re not going to go in and dictate the business plans of individual airlines, but we are going to set a standard in other words.”

Buttigieg said this sparks a conversation about how airlines can still operate and provide customer service in the future if technology goes down again.

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